ARM, Khronos back low-energy parallelism conference

LONDON – Processor IP licensor ARM Holdings plc and Khronos Group, the industry body that sets standards for graphics processing, are supporting the initial staging of a conference called LEAP, for low-energy application parallelism.

Keynotes from executives with ARM and Khronos will open the event, which is due to take place May 21 and 22 in central London. It is being set up to showcase advances in parallel computing technology on low-energy mobile CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and embedded devices.

The first day is expected to be a formal program of selected presentations while the second day has been earmarked for co-located workshops, tutorials, training opportunities and company events.

The program is set to cover applications such as computer vision and cryptography, hardware and software developments and techniques for writing portable applications.

Parallel programming of multicore CPUs and general-purpose computing on GPUs is starting to become necessary to exploit available resources efficiently but there is still a lot of uncertainty within the industry about approaches and architectures. The LEAP conference is chartered with helping move low-energy parallel computing forward across range of platforms, including; mobiles, tablets and all manner of embedded consumer, medical and industrial devices.

"Modern CPU and GPU architectures endorse parallelism as the route to achieve more performance and efficiency and to make new kinds of applications a reality on low-power platforms," said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, OpenCL chair and vice president of mobile content at Nvidia Corp., in a statement. "The evolution of OpenCL, Renderscript, CUDA and other APIs is helping to meet the growing demand for more accessible GFLOPS per milliwatt. LEAP provides an ideal and timely opportunity for developers and suppliers to get together to learn from each other," he added.

Trevett is set to provide one of the keynotes at the LEAP conference. Another will be provided by Roberto Mijat, visual computing manager at ARM.

The call for papers is still open, just, and details can be found at the event's website given below.